On the outside, it was a grand celebration. The Economic Community of West African States, or ECOWAS, was marking 50 years of existence. Nigeria’s financial capital, Lagos, was hosting the ECOWAS dignitaries. They included the bloc’s only surviving co-founder; 90-year-old Retired General Yakubu Gowon. Nigeria’s former military junta leader. Considering his own chequered past, it was both strange and fitting that he addressed the biggest crisis facing the West African Economic bloc; the recent exits of Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso from ECOWAS.
The three Sahel states were among the founding members of the West African economic community. But a spate of coup d’etats took place in the Sahel states, between 2020 and 2023. All three are now run by military juntas. The juntas formalised a separate regional group last July, called the Alliance of Sahel States. And while doing so, they also decided to leave ECOWAS. On the 29th of January this year, the three Sahelian founding members of ECOWAS formally exited the 15-member bloc. This was greeted with widespread celebrations in the three junta-led nations.
ECOWAS was officially established on the 28th of May, 1975. The goal was to foster regional economic cooperation. Citizens of ECOWAS member nations are allowed to move freely within the bloc. They have ECOWAS passports that are supposed to facilitate this free movement. ECOWAS countries impose lower tariffs on goods from fellow member states. This has helped create a large market for West African products. But that market started fragmenting after the three Sahel states exited ECOWAS. It has hurt trade in the bloc.
Tensions had been simmering for years, but they came to a head in 2023, in the aftermath of the Niger coup. ECOWAS had suspended Guinea, Mali and Burkina Faso when coups had taken place in those countries. But the bloc imposed sanctions on Niger, and even threatened to invade the nation, if President Mohamed Bazoum was not reinstated. Niger called ECOWAS’s bluff, tanking the bloc’s credibility as regional peacekeeper. The Nigerien Crisis set the stage for the eventual exit of the junta-run Sahel states from ECOWAS. And things have been going downhill in West Africa since.
Terrorism is on the rise in West Africa. For two consecutive years, the Institute for Economics and Peace think tank has named the Sahel as the global epicentre of terrorism. Attacks have spread from Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger to neighbouring Nigeria and Benin. The original promise of ECOWAS seems to be fading.
